Mozilla CEO John Lilly has a beef with Apple, which he made clear yesterday after he blasted the
company on its decision to package its Safari web browser with the latest
version of iTunes and Quicktime.
Specifically, Lilly laments Apple’s decision to bundle
Safari in a way that users have to opt-out of its installation during an
otherwise routine upgrade to iTunes. Pushing Safari on users who may not
understand what they’re doing “undermines the trust relationship great
companies have with their customers,” writes Lilly, “and that’s bad — not just
for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.”
He refers to Apple’s decision to include Safari in the latest
batch of updates issued to Windows iTunes users via Apple Software Update,
which lists Safari as a program requiring updates regardless of whether it’s
installed or not. As such, claims Lilly, unsuspecting users are lead to install
the browser when they might not be inclined to do so: “Apple has made it
incredibly easy — the default, even — for users to install ride along software
that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. This is wrong, and borders on
malware distribution practices.”
Apple’s decision to mimic the “malware distribution practice”
– where spyware is bundled with a program’s installer for various reasons,
usually to recoup development costs – is a problem because “software makers are
trying to get users to trust [them] on updates.” When presented with Apple
Update (or similar updaters from Java or Adobe), most users will simply click
the “install all items” button, “which means that they’ve now installed a completely
new piece of software, quite possibly completely unintentionally.”
“It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all
trying to build with users,” writes Lilly, “because it means that an update
isn’t just an update … maybe [it’s] something more,” ultimately undermining “the
safety of users on the web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice
and should stop.”
Critics
at The Register point out that
bundling Safari may also erode Firefox’s market share, by using
the power of defaults to force another browser on users – and going so far
as to speculate that Safari could usurp the millions of dollars of search
engine royalties that Google pays the Mozilla Foundation . In a follow-up posted
Sunday evening, Lilly disclaimed that sentiment, noting “unequivocally” that “it
isn’t about competition.”
“To the contrary: competition is good — necessary, actually …
as a consumer, I want more
competition,” wrote Lilly. “Firefox is better because there’s competition from
Safari and others — that’s great, because it means that normal people can find the
software that works best for them and make their own choices.”
Apple promised
last summer that it would use iTunes to help crack Safari’s sagging 5
percent market share, with Steve Jobs noting that Apple receives more than
500,000 download requests per day for the Windows version of iTunes.